Scale and Detail in the Cognition of Geographic Information   Description     Leaders     Meeting Topics     Participants   Meeting Report   VARENIUS HOME

Description of the Research Topic

Scale is one of the most fundamental yet poorly understood and confusing concepts underlying research involving geographic information. The term "scale" has multiple referents, including absolute size, relative size, resolution, granularity, and detail. This initiative focuses on explicating the multiple referents of scale and determining their consequences for thinking and decision-making involving geographic information. An emphasis will be placed on cognitive aspects of the scale problem as a complement to the traditional geographic and cartographic emphasis on scale in external representations. Basic questions to be pursued include: How do laypersons and experts conceptualize scale and scale-related phenomena, particularly given the multiple partially-related referents of the term? Do various geographic structures and processes come into existence at particular scales, and if so, how is this understood by users and consumers of geographic information? In what ways do laypersons and experts believe that phenomena are scale-independent or scale-dependent? What role does scale play in traditional arguments about form versus process? What are the difficulties inherent in communicating issues of scale, and what are more or less effective ways of accurately representing information about scale? Geographic information systems currently allow representing phenomena at multiple scales, and innovations in scale representation are constantly being developed. However, system developers do not pay much attention to issues of how scale communication impedes or facilitates valid communication of geographic phenomena; in particular, there is very little systematic research available to guide the development of such systems. As society makes the transition to the digital environment, associated metaphors for scale and scale transitions are likely to change as well. Map scale or representative fraction, the metric for scale in the traditional cartographic world, has no well-defined meaning in a digital world of seamless perspectives in which the user is free to zoom in or out at will. Can we identify the fundamental, invariant aspects of the concept of scale that survive the transition to the digital world? Can we identify their mappings to the concepts and metaphors currently used in naive and expert geography?

Central Research Issues

1. Difficulty of comprehending scale translations on maps and other representations.
• single static view, multiple views (zooming in-out).
• temporal scale in animations.
• can Virtual Environments help overcome scale translation problem?
2. Psychological scale classes:
• what is the evidence for their existence/nonexistence?
• what is the role of orientation
• specificity/flexibility?
• are they related to a perceptual
• cognitive shift?
• are there specific cognitive processes linked to specific scale classes?
• does knowledge precision vary with scale classes?
• what are the implications of such scale classes for the use and interpretation of geographic information?
3. Variations in spatial language as a function of the scale class of geographic phenomena.

 
4. Effective maximization of presented detail in geographic representations.

 
5. Basic conceptual structure of scale, size, resolution, and detail as a function of user expertise.

 
6. How strongly are they correlated? May they be completely independent?

 
7. Do the distinctions exist in a digital environment?

 
8. How does scale comprehension work in different sensory modalities?

 
9. Is knowledge derived at multiple scales combined or integrated, and if so, how?

 
10. Spatial knowledge from CRT vs. desktop VE vs. immersive VE.

 
11. Pattern extraction as a function of scale.

 
12. What is the relationship between scale and mental imagery?

 
13. Are there differences in the implications of scale of length, scale of width, and scale of height with respect to scene processing?